Consolation in Medieval Narrative: Augustinian Authority and Open Form by Chad D Schrock (review)

The author’s purpose is to discuss Augustinian narrative form in medieval consolatory writing, differentiating its linear trajectory with a climactic revelation and the Boethian paradigm of a Neoplatonic philosophical vision that transcends time and space. Relying on the classical and biblical traditions of consolation, Augustine envisaged a past definitively swept away, leaving a gap where past, present, and future all demand temporal consolation, without the closure of a vision of God.

Chad Schrock describes this post-historical narrative form, with climax and the need of consolation, as found in Augustine’s City of God and Confessions, works of sacred and personal history. He highlights the account of Augustine’s conversion, the importance of reading, and the difference between Boethian, transcendental closure and the more practical Augustinian model for consolatory narrative, which he studies in five disparate texts from the twelfth, fourteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The first is written in Latin and the others in English. They belong to the genres of sacred history, poetry, and dialogue, and contain elements of fiction and personal history.

Written to console a friend, Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum (c. 1130), reflects twelfth-century awareness of the individual and Abelard’s construction of self as a model of how to receive consolation. Schrock calls Abelard’s comparisons between his self and authoritative figures from biblical, classical, and Christian history ‘proportional consolation’, intended to evoke comfort and peace for the reader. Abelard, however, finds the source of his calamity in the fact that he is unlike anyone he knows, and seeks consolation in the post-history of his suffering. Somewhat as an afterthought, Schrock mentions Abelard’s correspondence with Heloïse, which might have shed more light on his troubles and the personal perspective, as in the chapter on Augustine.

The long, complex Piers Plowman (B-text) combines personal and ecclesial narratives. Correspondences with Augustine’s City are discernible. Schrock concludes that it dramatises the individual quest for Truth, the first-person narrator encountering the shape of his own story in the shape of sacred history, and is ‘paradigmatically Augustinian’ (p. 83).

The chapter on Augustine and Arthur, based on the Stanzaic Morte, a version of the end of the Vulgate Cycle, is an effective account of the final battles and catastrophe, with the Church’s intervention in the secular politics and justice of Arthur’s court. In an interesting, well-managed discussion of four significant episodes and the role of repetition and memory, Schrock puts less emphasis on the decline of Arthur’s court than on what remains, a lay spiritual community of survivors, in elegiac melancholy (p. 105).

In Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Boethian and Augustinian ideas are explicitly juxtaposed and a story from ancient history offers Chaucer’s contemporaries a consolatory narrative form of the type where, after a climactic break – Arcite’s death – a post-history is created by decisive, imitative action to fill the gap. Chaucer’s temporal orientation of the narrative thus makes Augustine his authority in the art of consolation.

The last example, Thomas More’s A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (c. 1534), written in prison, represents an elderly authoritative teacher conversing with a young mendicant, two Hungarian Christians together facing the threat of Turkish invasion, which would mean a radical break with the past. Philosophical consolation is inadequate; religious consolation is required: meditation leading to love of God for Himself and following the example of Christ. The parallel between Hungarian Christians and English Catholics of More’s time is evident. His style resembles that of Augustine in its complex exegesis, scriptural references, digressions, leisurely tempo, and structure.

In a shortish conclusion, Schrock draws together the threads. He clarifies certain notions, particularly ‘recursiveness’, which is used especially in discussion of Piers Plowman and The Knight’s Tale and is not included in the index. In Augustinian narrative, ‘the open-ended recursiveness of figural forms builds interpretive...